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| Abhijit Das |
Every day the news is becoming
painfully similar. A man in the US has shot students in a school or college, a
gang of young men had a street fight somewhere leaving many dead and wounded, a
young man is arrested in a European country for being part of a terrorist plot
that killed and maimed many people somewhere else, a man has raped a girl, a
brother has shot his sister for planning to marry a man of her choice in
Pakistan, a father killed his children and then his wife before hanging himself
somewhere deep in the central part of India. The list is endless.
Men all over the world are in the
news for killing, shooting, raping, road rage, domestic violence, honour
killing, acid attacks and many more forms of violence against others – women,
men, children, sisters, children, wives. Society has often glorified violence
and killing, especially in wars aimed at political gain and public safety,
where the other ‘party’ is cast as the enemy. But in recent times such ‘heroic’
acts of violence seem to be replaced by more inter-personal violence, or
violence which is not aimed at any obvious enemy. And this disease seems to
affect men everywhere.
In the last few weeks I have had
discussions with the leadership of a number of development organisations who
have asked me about ways they could start a conversation with men in the
communities that they work in. All these organisations have been working with
women for years, in some cases decades. Women had organized into community
groups, they were engaged in different kinds of economic activity, were
bringing more money into their households, but now because they were more
articulate and mobile and had more aspirations for themselves they faced resistance from men in their families
and in their communities. The request was that we work with men at community
and family levels to create a more supportive and enabling environment for
these obviously empowered women.
You may be wondering, what is the
relationship between the violence by men that I have described in the first
instance and the societal and familial control exerted by men in the second?
For me the relationship lies in our expectation of men in the family and in
society. In the second case there is an expectation now that the men become
facilitative of women’s new aspirations, provide them with encouragement, or at
least space and opportunity. While I can understand where the anxiety of the
organisations comes from, and respect their understanding of women’s rights, I
feel that they have failed to understand how patriarchy -- a society based on
men’s primacy -- creates men and
leads to a kind of ‘hegemonic’ masculinity which controls not only through
boundaries, orders, coercion and force but equally through a kind of overweening
concern and protectiveness. Men are comfortable being in a position of authority
tinged by fear, and if we work with men to make them understand women’s need
for more opportunity and space, moving men to this different position can
become equally problematic, as some can become violent or cruelly controlling
when their control is challenged.
This phenomenon, of men becoming
cruel and violent when their comfort levels are upset or challenged, is at the
core of the high levels of violence that we are witnessing everywhere.
Violence, control and coercion
are key to expressions of power, and as mentioned earlier, society often
valorizes these expressions for purposes of ‘safety’ and ‘discipline’. Boys are
trained to become men in all families, internalizing masculine roles through
myths, stories, games, toys, comic books, video games, TV serials -- this list is endless, too. Even the most
well-meaning mother prepares her son for his future role by encouraging study,
sports and outdoor life, and discouraging the practice of household work, or of
art, music or dolls.
Among the emotions allowed by masculinity,
being sad is discouraged, and anger is allowed but immediately pacified or satisfied
so that disappointment doesn’t linger. Today boys are encouraged to be happy
and successful at all costs, and they are not at all trained to manage
disappointment. So we raise boys to be men who are familiar with being in
positions where their needs are satisfied -- in other words, to be in positions
of authority and power. They know they can express dissatisfaction through
anger and believe that violence by people in positions of authority can be morally
justified if it is against an ‘enemy’. Taken together this can become a very
toxic mix.
But the real world is very
different from the cocoon of the family. It is full of potential
disappointments and frustrations. Today the world order is changing rapidly. Subordinate
social classes are now much more assertive, livelihood opportunities are evaporating,
jobs are insecure and there is increasing poverty. In many cases, the security
of the home is becoming lost due to patterns of migration. There are more men
who find their world topsy-turvy and fewer reside in the comfort zone of
continued privilege and authority. In this confusion many try to hang on
to earlier security blankets of caste,
ethnic, race or religious--based superiority. And many groups are in turn preying
on this insecurity of young men. The killing of bloggers in Bangladesh or the
ISIS, they all seem to be feeding off this phenomenon. Men now see the ‘enemy’
everywhere and thus their violence is justified. This sense now has come to
infuse politics everywhere as well.
The staggering economic growth of
neo-liberal capitalism, coupled with the technological revolution have not only
given the world unprecedented rates of change, but have also led to increasing
social and economic division all over the world. Women have been aspiring for
social, economic and political changes and achieving them for the last hundred
years. Women have fought for changes and so are adapting to the overall environment
of change much better than men. The fact that women at home are aspiring for
change and adapting to change so easily also makes enemies out of them. This
may explain some of the violence that is happening at home and in the
community. At the same time men’s inability to cope with change sometimes
induces a deep sense of failure. Failure is a phenomenon men are not trained to
deal with. From childhood onwards success is the only credo they have learnt –
in school, in the field, in the battle field. Believing that a man who has lost
has no honour, many failed farmers in India have opted for suicide, leaving
their families to manage their inherited debt. Women, better trained to manage
failure, and continue on in their absence.
Where does this analysis leave us
in our dealings with men? What pathways to a different future does it indicate?
Some of us who have been engaged in women’s empowerment have been experimenting
with how to work with men as allies in this process. In the last two decades or
so we have learnt some lessons about how we may work towards a better future.
Many men find the incidents of
violence that I mentioned in the first paragraph ‘upsetting’, or ‘gross’, or
‘unacceptable’. It is a matter of hope that there are such men, because in this
feeling of disquiet is the seed of a new understanding of human relations. In
many cases this sense of disquiet is followed by a rationalization that such
violence happens among ‘others,’ or by avoiding such news, or in some cases by an intellectual discussion about the state of
the world which creates sufficient distance between such events and our
personal world to render them harmless.
The beginning to a different
future lies in the acknowledgment that the problem is not in ‘those’ men or
communities, but in the men we ourselves bring up -- our boys -- through our
own unconscious reinforcement of hegemonic masculinity. The most enlightened
parent concerned about equality between the sexes will say “I bring up my
daughter like a son” but it is never the reverse. Boys are never taught the
values of nurturing and empathy, of managing adversity and failure, and to
manage for themselves. Among all classes it is nearly universal for a boy not
to clean his own dishes or his own clothes. This is not just a training for
future participation in domestic work but
a valuable lesson in self-sufficiency. Of course there is a pressure to
succeed, but rarely an emphasis on collaboration, cooperation or respect for
others. Equally if not even more important is the need to train boys to manage
disappointment.
Now let me come to the afore-mentioned
discussions I’ve had with leaders of development organisations and the problem
that they see women in their communities facing. Here too the solution does not
lie in the most obvious approaches, i.e., asking men to loosen control at home
and to protect women in public places. These approaches, as I mentioned earlier,
can inadvertently create greater paternalistic concern and control.
We have found through our work
that to create greater gender collaboration between women and men we need to
work from the place where there is the least contest. In the typical patriarchal
set-up, public space belongs to men and private space is the women’s domain,
but under masculine control. This control is maintained either directly or
indirectly through other senior women like the mother-in-law. There is little
interaction between women and men, even husbands and wives, in the home or
personal space. An obvious symptom of this dynamic is men not sharing
housework. However, even child care is often the sole domain of women. In rural
India we have found that there are many physical barriers between husbands and
wives interacting with any degree of intimacy. Similarly, brothers and sisters
often drift apart after puberty. Fathers are not close to young children, since
the latter reside within the women’s domain and only when sons become men
through a coming-of-age ritual does the ‘man-to-man’ bond strengthen. We have
found some men regret the lack of closer interaction with their wives, with
their daughters, or even their sisters and sisters-in-law.
In our work we have found that
building closer relations with women at home has enabled men to understand the
value of empathy. In forging closer relations with their children, men have
come to value the virtues of care, nurture and sharing. And this has happened
with adult men in their twenties and thirties, and even older. In addition, men
can be encouraged to develop a new sense of fairness which is able to see
through the limitations of social arrangements of patriarchy. Taking this a
step forward, we have successfully encouraged men to take stands on caste and
religious discrimination as well. But the initial step was taken via the roles
and relations in the family.
I have heard friends say that
this kind of work is essentially ‘reformist’ and not sufficiently political, as
it does not adequately address deeply ingrained power inequalities embedded in
society. Others have said that it lays too much emphasis on the private and
personal sphere and not the public or political space. I hear them and I understand
their anxiety. My justification of our approach is not only through my own
personal practice and some small- and large-scale community-based
interventions, but also draws on a nuanced understanding of power and privilege
and how it is exercised and experienced.
A politically-sound approach
towards social justice or an envisioned world with less violence and more
mediated solutions to it cannot come from work with the violent and the under-
privileged alone. Many political movements have been born from a sense of
injustice and claims for rights and justice. However, acknowledgement of this reality
requires people in positions of power and privilege to change their own actions
and exercise of power accordingly. In the battlefield the loser loses power; in
a negotiated settlement a third party is often asked to mediate so that there
is acceptable ‘loss of face’ for the party which is required to cede most in
the settlement.
In society there is often no
third party. To get where we want to get – to gender equality - men need to
give up their positions of authority, which requires first that they
acknowledge that their present advantages of power and privilege are often one-sided
and lead to the subordination of others. But they have never given up power without
loss of face. At home and within intimate relationships they can give up power
without loss of face and become used to a sense of comfort without wielding
power and authority. This can serve as is valuable practice for creative use of
men’s ability to share power and yield authority in public spaces without a
sense of loss. We have seen it happen, over and over and in different
situations.
We believe that there is no
better time than the present to take these lessons to scale. If we feel that
what we see around is unacceptable, if we believe in the fundamental equality
among all humans, then we can adopt these simple ways of behaving towards
others and the way we raise our children, especially our boys. In it lies the
only hope for the profound changes that we all want to see for the world which
we leave behind for our children. If you agree, share this with you friends.
